


How to Grow Up

by preraphhobbit



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, bc everything hurts, everyone is an adult and its 2017, idk what this is honestly, this was supposed to be one fic and now there's multiple chapters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-01
Updated: 2017-11-01
Packaged: 2019-01-28 00:36:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12594112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/preraphhobbit/pseuds/preraphhobbit
Summary: it is forty years after the events in hawkins. mike wheeler and the rest of the gang, now adults, have returned to hawkins for their annual weekend at joyce byer's house, to relive past lives and contemplate the future. (one chapter per character, i have no idea where i'm going with this.)





	How to Grow Up

**Author's Note:**

> first half of mike's chapter. the tags and description says it all. not sure if i will add onto this bc i'm genuinely unsure if anyone will want to read it; however, i'm putting out there just in case.

Mike

In some ways, maybe he was disappointed their daughter hadn’t been born with her mother’s abilities. It was ridiculous, of course. A lifetime of scrutiny and secrets didn’t appeal to him any more than it appealed to Elle, and in time he’d lost the habit of calling her Eleven anyway. Elle was the name on her passport. Like an old coat they’d shed what had been unusual, filed the events of the eighties in darkened corners of their memories, and tried to live normally.

There were moments, of course: the slam of the screen door to disrupt the whine of its hinges when no one was near it, cups of coffee that drifted lazily from the counter to the table, the snot-nosed kid who shoved Alice in the schoolyard suddenly coming down with an infectious rash. She was careful to hide it. As Alice got older she started noticing things- they both knew that- but she knew better than to ask about them. Elle never liked to talk about her childhood. With her dark hair braided over her shoulders- she never did like to cut it- she was utterly unlike who she had been, and yet was somehow the same.

Yet Mike had, in some strange and selfish way, wondered what would have happened in Alice was more like her mother. She was like her in the obvious ways- she had a stare to stop you cold, no powers needed, and she was skinny and had her mother’s lean, serious features. But she wasn’t sensitive like Elle. She was anxious and liked video games more than books, if truth be told, and struggled to make friends- which was like Mike himself. And there was nothing wrong with that, of course: yet he wondered if Alice was like Mike or if she was like who Elle might have been. There was not denying that what happened to someone changed them from who they might have been. He loved Elle, and he loved Alice, but there were some parts of the woman he married that he’d never understand.

Maybe it was like that for everyone who’d gone into the Upside-Down. Take Will, for instance. They’d lost touch after a while- it was just what happened- but once Alice had gotten him signed up for Facebook they’d talked a few times. He was on medication now- mood stabilizers. It was just one of those things that happened. He’d had a bad episode- which is what they called slipping back into the Upside-Down for a few traumatic seconds now- and taken a sabbatical from his work. 

Mike Wheeler: You could talk to someone about it.

Will Byers: I talk to Jonathan sometimes. Mom too, but its harder for her.

Mike Wheeler: I mean more 3F%ike a therapist or so7%/&thing.

Will Byers: A couple of years ago I tried. But how do you explain the Upside-Down to someone who’s never seen it? To someone who doesn’t believe in it? 

When I try to explain what’s happening to anyone who wasn’t there, I get told I’m delusional. Paranoid. In a nice way, of course, but they think I’m crazy, and it’s remembering I’m not crazy that helped me get this far. If I start thinking maybe I made it all up, then I get bad again.

Mike Wheeler: Oh.

Will designed monsters in video games. Mike wasn’t sure it was all that healthy, but Will seemed happy. And he made a lot of money doing it too: people were scared of WIll’s monsters, and they liked that. Terror was marketable. Maybe it always had been.

For the last six years, they’d all made a point of going back to Hawkins for Halloween weekend. It had been Joyce’s idea. An anniversary day, for Will and Elle, to keep them from forgetting. To help them remember who they were. 

And it was more than that too, Mike guessed: there was a more sinister implication to their yearly meetings there, when it might have been easier just to fly into O’Hare and get dinner together in Chicago, and that was walking around the abandoned lab to ensure it still lay dormant under the deadfall. 

The laboratory officially went under in ‘92 or ‘93. He couldn’t remember the date really. Before Alice was born. When the doors were locked for good, and nobody objected to the graffito that appeared on its walls, they’d all breathed a little deeper, and Elle finally took up permanent residence in Mike’s Philadelphia apartment. And then Alice was conceived. It was like Elle didn’t have to keep outrunning something. She could sit quietly for a while, and be happy.

In the end the apartment become a house in the suburbs, Alice grew up and went off to college, and the Halloween reunions started. Dustin and Lucas drove up from Arizona- they liked the trip, had ended up the same college working together on theoretical physics. They were a little strange but well-respected, and nobody knew about the short-haired woman in Philadelphia who had inspired most of their work.

And himself and Elle took a plane to Chicago, rented a car, and drove through the old countryside back towards Hawkins. Will was always waiting for them in the house Joyce had come to share with Hopper, once he’d retired. No surprise there, if any of them were honest, although when they’d gone for Christmas a dozen years back and seen Hop drinking coffee in his longjohns just as if he’d always been there, while Joyce fretted over bacon and eggs- well, they’d traded dubious looks among themselves and rested uncomfortably with the knowledge Joyce and Hop did not sleep in separate beds. Later, there was laughter. Some things never changed.

The house was always warm and bright, the walls heavy with Jonathan’s photographs and some of Will’s artwork (never monsters); there was always something to eat, a place to talk or a place to be alone, hot baths, and strong coffee. It was nice to see Joyce, who was by now pushing seventy. 

Sometimes Jonathan came; sometimes he didn’t. There was difficulty because sometimes Nancy came, and sometimes she did not, and once she was married Jonathan’s mouth drew up small and stingy and he began talking even less. They’d all gone back to Hawkins for her wedding (three years before El came back), of course, one of the monster fighters, and Mike had appropriately been a groomsman, and the Byers sat fourth-row back looking varying shades uncomfortable (Joyce the least, Will slightly, Jonathan fairly green). 

“A house at the end of the cul-de-sac,” he was muttering to himself, when Mike found him outside dragging anxiously on a cigarette. “She just went and got a goddamn...house on the end of the cul-de-sac.”

“Are...are you okay?” Mike asked.

“Yeah, fine.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Just...happy for your sister.”

He wasn’t, and Mike wasn’t either, but neither of them could say that. It was unseasonably cold for June and Mike shivered in his rented suit. The parking lot was full, and the sky was so much darker than in the city. He’d forgotten that.

“Didn’t you think she’d get out of Hawkins?” Jonathan asked suddenly. “After what happened?”

“Yeah,” Mike confessed. “The rest of us did.”

“Except Mom.” His smile was thin. “Mom didn’t leave, but she was different. Your sister, I just…”

“I know,” said Mike. “I thought the same thing.”

He hadn’t understood why Nancy chose to get married. To stay. It wasn’t the someone they knew, either- even Steve Harington, the personal darling of Hawkins, got out eventually, and it wasn’t with Nancy strapped into the passenger seat. Troy, from Chicago, came and opened a fast-food joint at Hawkins highway juncture, and that was who she’d married. She got her house at the end of the cul-de-sac, worked data entry for the doctor, and had children. 

If Mike was honest he thought she was crazy. 

“Jonathan went to see her before the wedding,” Will told him later, in hushed tones. “I think he asked her to marry him and go to London with him, but she said no.”

“She doesn’t look happy, does she?” Mike replied quietly. She didn’t: every time they saw each other it was like her smile had been painted into place with her Revlon. 

From the wedding onward he hadn’t spoken to Will, and he hadn’t understood Nancy, but after Alice set up his Facebook and he had spoken to Will again he did suddenly. Or maybe it was the fact that their father died (angina) and then his mother sold their house and moved permanently to Florida like she’d always wanted. Whatever it was, he understood Nancy even if he didn’t want to. You had a choice with things like what had happened to them: you could remember and let it sting you, you could remember and have to outrun it for the rest of your life, or you could surrender to the apathy and let it take over you. And Nancy had surrendered, because she’d never wanted to run. She wasn’t like Elle. She wasn’t like the rest of them.

As for the rest of them, like tributaries they always found their way back to the source. Back to Hawkins, back to Joyce Byer’s house, back to Jim Hopper and his surly ways, back to the abandoned lab nobody wanted to touch. It was their personal shrine, their tomb, and somehow nothing had changed. The new highway crossed over a few miles north; nobody ventured far enough down to give the town some new-century energy. The shops came and went, but the buildings stayed the same. A mall got built, but it wasn’t for Hawkins, and a bus went there, but nobody went on it. It was like Hawkins was frozen in time, neither aging nor growing. Just somewhere in between, in its own personal Upside-Down.

This time, something felt different. Maybe it was the text he'd gotten from Dustin when they disembarked at Chicago, strange as his texts from Dustin always were. _Something I have to tell you. Come straight here. ___


End file.
